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Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, and Memoirs
"Stories, Essays, and Memoir" presents Welty's collected short stories, an astonishing body of work that has made her one of the most respected writers of short fiction. "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (1941), her first book, includes many of her most popular stories, such as "A Worn Path, " "Powerhouse, " and the farcical "Why I Live at the P.O." "The Wide Net and Other Stories" (1943), in which historical figures such as Aaron Burr ("First Love") and John James Audubon ("A Still Moment") appear as characters, shows her evolving mastery as a regional chronicler. "The Golden Apples" (1949) is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. It was Welty's favorite among her books. The stories of "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" (1955) are set both in the South and in Europe. Also included are two stories from the 1960s, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?," based on the shooting of Medgar Evers, and "The Demonstrators." A selection of nine literary and personal essays includes evocations of the Jackson of her youth that is essential to her work and cogent discussions of literary form.
980 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
19 people are currently reading
1179 people want to read
About the author
Eudora Welty
239 books1,015 followersEudora Alice Welty was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.
Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia Business School. While at Columbia University, where she was the captain of the women's polo team, Welty was a regular at Romany Marie's café in 1930.
During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs.
Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the legendary and oft-anthologized stories "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man," and "A Worn Path." Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story, and was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, where, despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of her hometown.
Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson.
Excerpted and adopted from Wikipedia.
Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia Business School. While at Columbia University, where she was the captain of the women's polo team, Welty was a regular at Romany Marie's café in 1930.
During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs.
Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the legendary and oft-anthologized stories "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man," and "A Worn Path." Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story, and was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, where, despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of her hometown.
Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson.
Excerpted and adopted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 1, 2021
Short stories, by necessity, do not have room for the expansiveness of the novel. There is often a sense that the story could only have happened in one way; an inevitable climax occurs, surrounded on one side or both by other inevitabilities. There is an inflection point in the story when events clarify themselves as unavoidable, and there is a corresponding epiphanic moment—at the same time or later, and maybe not even occurring during the reading itself but at some point after, the reader’s of the experience cantilevered out past the length of the story itself—of realization for the reader, and these two points help to define the story in the way that foci help to define conic sections.
Eudora Welty’s stories have a third such point, where the characters themselves become aware of, and resign themselves to, the single sequence of events that has been the result of the emotions and impulses—their own and others—that stifle them; often, they are transported for a time into their memories, as if slowly recognizing the through-line that has led them to where they are. Our recognition builds gradually, too, but again on a different timeline; Welty’s hints at predestination with lines like “He might have been keeping track over years and miles of how long they could keep that tiny ferry waiting,” and “‘Four minutes to four,’ the lady in the raincoat said, those fours sounding fated” (no coincidence, I imagine, that those examples explicitly relate to time).
Welty’s stories do often raise, and even suggest, alternate possibilities—characters often imagine how events might play out (and also sometimes are permitted brief visions of their actual futures), a mirror of their dives into their memories—and while these often aren’t to end up coming true, the movements of the stories away from other alternatives don’t really read like traditional reversals. The people who agitate for them change their minds, for no apparent reason except perhaps a distaste of change; their very agency seems like a lack thereof, and this virtual lack of agency is yet another example of her character’s missing things that were once had and known, so that the specifics of their deprivation are understood.
Those specifics might be the only thing her characters do understand; they certainly seem to be without an accurate understanding of the circumstances they’re in. Stifled by emotions and recurring sense of their own uselessness, their actions seem a direct continuation of the forces acting on them rather than the reflection of reason or choice. There is a fragility, mental and physical, to the characters, as if they are near death, or just physically drying up, perhaps as a result of fighting the tide. Life pointedly continues on at the end of Welty’s stories; life goes on, but the life force often seems to have left her characters.
In A Curtain of Green, her very first short-story collection, Eudora Welty seems to have already mastered the form. There are mysteries to her characters’ behavior, but the mysteries are not the actions which seem, on the surface, as if they would be inexplicable—Welty makes these seem understandable; instead, the responses to this behavior, and the changes of those responses, are what are so mysterious. Because the behaviors are ones that normally would be hard to understand, or perhaps even imagine, we can appreciate why the other characters might be thrown by this, and not know how to respond, or why their instincts are what they are. Welty creates destabilized environments and then stabilizes them. Even the very building blocks of her prose are destabilizing, to the reader. She invents metaphors and similes so unusual and distinct, analogous at such oblique angles, that they need to be positioned in a created context, rather than one merely imitating the world; if a sense of reality were intended, they would feel unanchored to it, as if in a vacuum.
In the second story collection, The Wide Net, stories explicitly speak of moments and mysteries, scopes are often narrowed to the moment in question, details are given more apparent, and this all results in a vastly reduced power as a result. Emotions are conveyed, but they are also easier to put a name on. There is more of a mechanical, formulated feel to the scenarios—known historical figures are placed into unknown roles and unimagined new contexts that rhyme with the way circumstances are made to change in ways that characters couldn’t imagine; the telling, too, feels a bit too self-conscious, and overly omniscient, without the sense of some constraint present in the earlier stories. All the meaning seems to be made apparent instead of left for one to discover.
In The Golden Apples, Welty returns to form with narration that calls more attention to the characters than to its own voice. The stories are given more length, and as a result have more space to work with, but Welty is careful in how she makes use of that; despite the greater length, the stories have no more happening in them. Instead of increasing the number of events—these stories are defiantly not about their “central” incidents; “Music from Spain” is particularly brilliant in dispensing with any sort of expected ending or consequences, or even any manifestations of the possibilities theoretically offered by the basic premise of the story—Welty increases the number of details that she provides, striking an ideal middle ground between the earlier two collections by giving her stories scopes equivalent to those in A Curtain of Green in combination with the accretion of detail found in The Wide Net. A shared connection to the same setting extends across all the stories—even one that takes place elsewhere—allowing an even greater accumulation of details, while Welty is careful to let this connection strengthen the individual stories without being required to support them. These are her most absorbing stories, wrapping the reader up and pulling him into their world.
The Bride of the Innisfallen, Welty’s fourth collection, starts out with an equally strong first story that makes one lose his bearings and forget the timeline of the story, the exact nature of the relationship between the central characters, etc.; maybe more than anything, it made me forget that it would have to end soon. “Story” felt insufficient to describe it, so great was its capacity, and yet to say that it created a world, or a life, seems equally unsuitable by way of triteness; nevertheless, it did create the best sense of place—even more so than that of Morgana, Miss., created in The Golden Apples—and maybe the first that matches Welty’s prose in being a delight all on its own. But after the first story, the others in the compilation seem almost too crowded; Welty almost seems to consciously misdirect the reader’s attention, but part of it seems unintentional as well—there are too many details to pay attention to, and they’re too diffuse. It’s as if she doubled down on the focus on details in her previous set of stories (much as The Wide Net may have been the result of trying to commit too much to the stylistic successes of A Curtain of Green), but left us with too much of a good thing, to the degree that the details almost seem to fade away to abstractions, used to create a mood where the specifics no longer matter; that mood—one of contemplativeness—is occasionally conveyed, but more often one only gets the sense that it’s intended. At least one unanswered question can be perceived hovering above each story, but only one, and there’s none of the pull or the magnetism to make one intrigued by it; I found myself trying to talk myself into being interested, into seeking more, but it was difficult. Welty pins stories to the historical events, foreign settings, mythology, and seems to feel, as a result, no further need to create her own world, no further burden to craft a self-contained narrative (another failing that seems reminiscent of the second collection, where the insertion of real-world characters may have had a similar effect).
Welty’s essays give a sense of where the sensibility that manifests itself in fiction comes from. She abstracts her discussion of the Mississippi river country over time, so as to construct a backdrop rather than to focus on discrete events, reminding one of an idea she expressed about the way that a Native American tribe understood place in the context of time; cast backward over the stories that preceded the essays, this made me realize the degree to which temporality and locality are inseparable in her work. When she does address individual events in other essays, they are trivial, though nearly elevated to the non-trivial by the attention she directs.
Welty not only demonstrates the unconscious interests and choices that reflect themselves in her fiction, but also explicitly addresses the deep thought that she put into being both a reader and a writer, and discusses notable readers other than herself, possibly hinting at the thought she gave a potential audience. She is sometimes quite explicit in some of her aims in writing stories; when she says “I admit that I did expect to sound mysterious now and then, if I could,” it confirms just how solidly she hit certain of her targets. She even implicitly suggests what she was aiming for in The Wide Net, although the page alone that does so probably more effectively achieves her goal.
The memoir One Writer’s Beginnings (whose style is anticipated somewhat by the essay “The Little Store”) might reveal best Welty’s innate sense for what makes material, and indeed explores, through the lens of senses—hearing and sight, in the first two chapters (“Listening” and “Learning to See”)—just how she learned to pay attention to the world, and then, equally important, how she learned to transform sensory inputs into her output, in the third and final chapter, “Finding a Voice.” She reveals her knowledge of exactly what details to include, and just how much to disclose so as to tantalize (one episode involving a kitchen knife, another lightning, to do some tantalizing of my own). She demonstrates her gift for the unexpected synthesis of incident and emotion, and for knowing where she can leave gaps, understanding where the connections exists that serve as bridges between the writer and her readers. The memoir is a pure distillation of her talents, allowing her to showcase her skills of curation and molding without needing her arc to arrive at an endpoint; the endpoint had already been arrived at, in the form of her body of work, to the end of which One Writer’s Beginnings was neatly appended.
Eudora Welty’s stories have a third such point, where the characters themselves become aware of, and resign themselves to, the single sequence of events that has been the result of the emotions and impulses—their own and others—that stifle them; often, they are transported for a time into their memories, as if slowly recognizing the through-line that has led them to where they are. Our recognition builds gradually, too, but again on a different timeline; Welty’s hints at predestination with lines like “He might have been keeping track over years and miles of how long they could keep that tiny ferry waiting,” and “‘Four minutes to four,’ the lady in the raincoat said, those fours sounding fated” (no coincidence, I imagine, that those examples explicitly relate to time).
Welty’s stories do often raise, and even suggest, alternate possibilities—characters often imagine how events might play out (and also sometimes are permitted brief visions of their actual futures), a mirror of their dives into their memories—and while these often aren’t to end up coming true, the movements of the stories away from other alternatives don’t really read like traditional reversals. The people who agitate for them change their minds, for no apparent reason except perhaps a distaste of change; their very agency seems like a lack thereof, and this virtual lack of agency is yet another example of her character’s missing things that were once had and known, so that the specifics of their deprivation are understood.
Those specifics might be the only thing her characters do understand; they certainly seem to be without an accurate understanding of the circumstances they’re in. Stifled by emotions and recurring sense of their own uselessness, their actions seem a direct continuation of the forces acting on them rather than the reflection of reason or choice. There is a fragility, mental and physical, to the characters, as if they are near death, or just physically drying up, perhaps as a result of fighting the tide. Life pointedly continues on at the end of Welty’s stories; life goes on, but the life force often seems to have left her characters.
In A Curtain of Green, her very first short-story collection, Eudora Welty seems to have already mastered the form. There are mysteries to her characters’ behavior, but the mysteries are not the actions which seem, on the surface, as if they would be inexplicable—Welty makes these seem understandable; instead, the responses to this behavior, and the changes of those responses, are what are so mysterious. Because the behaviors are ones that normally would be hard to understand, or perhaps even imagine, we can appreciate why the other characters might be thrown by this, and not know how to respond, or why their instincts are what they are. Welty creates destabilized environments and then stabilizes them. Even the very building blocks of her prose are destabilizing, to the reader. She invents metaphors and similes so unusual and distinct, analogous at such oblique angles, that they need to be positioned in a created context, rather than one merely imitating the world; if a sense of reality were intended, they would feel unanchored to it, as if in a vacuum.
In the second story collection, The Wide Net, stories explicitly speak of moments and mysteries, scopes are often narrowed to the moment in question, details are given more apparent, and this all results in a vastly reduced power as a result. Emotions are conveyed, but they are also easier to put a name on. There is more of a mechanical, formulated feel to the scenarios—known historical figures are placed into unknown roles and unimagined new contexts that rhyme with the way circumstances are made to change in ways that characters couldn’t imagine; the telling, too, feels a bit too self-conscious, and overly omniscient, without the sense of some constraint present in the earlier stories. All the meaning seems to be made apparent instead of left for one to discover.
In The Golden Apples, Welty returns to form with narration that calls more attention to the characters than to its own voice. The stories are given more length, and as a result have more space to work with, but Welty is careful in how she makes use of that; despite the greater length, the stories have no more happening in them. Instead of increasing the number of events—these stories are defiantly not about their “central” incidents; “Music from Spain” is particularly brilliant in dispensing with any sort of expected ending or consequences, or even any manifestations of the possibilities theoretically offered by the basic premise of the story—Welty increases the number of details that she provides, striking an ideal middle ground between the earlier two collections by giving her stories scopes equivalent to those in A Curtain of Green in combination with the accretion of detail found in The Wide Net. A shared connection to the same setting extends across all the stories—even one that takes place elsewhere—allowing an even greater accumulation of details, while Welty is careful to let this connection strengthen the individual stories without being required to support them. These are her most absorbing stories, wrapping the reader up and pulling him into their world.
The Bride of the Innisfallen, Welty’s fourth collection, starts out with an equally strong first story that makes one lose his bearings and forget the timeline of the story, the exact nature of the relationship between the central characters, etc.; maybe more than anything, it made me forget that it would have to end soon. “Story” felt insufficient to describe it, so great was its capacity, and yet to say that it created a world, or a life, seems equally unsuitable by way of triteness; nevertheless, it did create the best sense of place—even more so than that of Morgana, Miss., created in The Golden Apples—and maybe the first that matches Welty’s prose in being a delight all on its own. But after the first story, the others in the compilation seem almost too crowded; Welty almost seems to consciously misdirect the reader’s attention, but part of it seems unintentional as well—there are too many details to pay attention to, and they’re too diffuse. It’s as if she doubled down on the focus on details in her previous set of stories (much as The Wide Net may have been the result of trying to commit too much to the stylistic successes of A Curtain of Green), but left us with too much of a good thing, to the degree that the details almost seem to fade away to abstractions, used to create a mood where the specifics no longer matter; that mood—one of contemplativeness—is occasionally conveyed, but more often one only gets the sense that it’s intended. At least one unanswered question can be perceived hovering above each story, but only one, and there’s none of the pull or the magnetism to make one intrigued by it; I found myself trying to talk myself into being interested, into seeking more, but it was difficult. Welty pins stories to the historical events, foreign settings, mythology, and seems to feel, as a result, no further need to create her own world, no further burden to craft a self-contained narrative (another failing that seems reminiscent of the second collection, where the insertion of real-world characters may have had a similar effect).
Welty’s essays give a sense of where the sensibility that manifests itself in fiction comes from. She abstracts her discussion of the Mississippi river country over time, so as to construct a backdrop rather than to focus on discrete events, reminding one of an idea she expressed about the way that a Native American tribe understood place in the context of time; cast backward over the stories that preceded the essays, this made me realize the degree to which temporality and locality are inseparable in her work. When she does address individual events in other essays, they are trivial, though nearly elevated to the non-trivial by the attention she directs.
Welty not only demonstrates the unconscious interests and choices that reflect themselves in her fiction, but also explicitly addresses the deep thought that she put into being both a reader and a writer, and discusses notable readers other than herself, possibly hinting at the thought she gave a potential audience. She is sometimes quite explicit in some of her aims in writing stories; when she says “I admit that I did expect to sound mysterious now and then, if I could,” it confirms just how solidly she hit certain of her targets. She even implicitly suggests what she was aiming for in The Wide Net, although the page alone that does so probably more effectively achieves her goal.
The memoir One Writer’s Beginnings (whose style is anticipated somewhat by the essay “The Little Store”) might reveal best Welty’s innate sense for what makes material, and indeed explores, through the lens of senses—hearing and sight, in the first two chapters (“Listening” and “Learning to See”)—just how she learned to pay attention to the world, and then, equally important, how she learned to transform sensory inputs into her output, in the third and final chapter, “Finding a Voice.” She reveals her knowledge of exactly what details to include, and just how much to disclose so as to tantalize (one episode involving a kitchen knife, another lightning, to do some tantalizing of my own). She demonstrates her gift for the unexpected synthesis of incident and emotion, and for knowing where she can leave gaps, understanding where the connections exists that serve as bridges between the writer and her readers. The memoir is a pure distillation of her talents, allowing her to showcase her skills of curation and molding without needing her arc to arrive at an endpoint; the endpoint had already been arrived at, in the form of her body of work, to the end of which One Writer’s Beginnings was neatly appended.
September 21, 2025
Reading three volumes of Welty's short stores here - A Curtain of Green, The Golden Apples and The Bride of Innisfallen - makes one yearn for a seminar in Welty and Faulkner together. The richness and challenge of exploring their respective versions of the same geography and people of rural Mississippi, the presence and power of the past, the centrality of family/neighbors, the use of myth, the measure of time and depth/detail of descrition would be a mighty learning experience for all.
July 1, 2012
I read Eudora Welty because she was someone who's been lauded as a writer who is fundamentally Southern, and as Mississippi as they come. As problematic as that state's history has been towards a history of people like me, and having produced one side of my family, I was eager to read her writing.
I'm not saying that it isn't, in its own way, classic, but I'm not sure if that's simply a product of the bar being set really low for Mississippians in the arts anyway. Her writings evoke scenes and emotions, and she is quite capable of spinning a yarn and detailing facts. It just wasn't anything special to me. Besides the utter rage I felt as she described the white racist's thought process in "Where Is The Voice Coming From?", one of her more well-known works. Other than that, not much else.
I'm not saying that it isn't, in its own way, classic, but I'm not sure if that's simply a product of the bar being set really low for Mississippians in the arts anyway. Her writings evoke scenes and emotions, and she is quite capable of spinning a yarn and detailing facts. It just wasn't anything special to me. Besides the utter rage I felt as she described the white racist's thought process in "Where Is The Voice Coming From?", one of her more well-known works. Other than that, not much else.
November 14, 2009
WOW!! Truly a treasure trove. Interestingly, in a collection of stories that play largely in her native South, my favorite story was "The Bride of the Innisfallen," about a railway journey and ferry crossing from England to Ireland. Go figure.
August 6, 2013
These stories have lush descriptions, fully-developed characters, and interesting plot lines. It’s absolute poetry. I wish I hadn't left it at my parents' house.
March 20, 2019
In fact, I was not able to locate The Collected Works of Eudora Welty and this edition was the closest one to that book.
With that caveat, I have enjoyed reading from this well-known and highly regarded author of southern fiction over the past two weeks. In certain instances, I read the stories out loud or listened to recordings, as a way to get inside the diction which reflects Welty's immersion in her native state of Mississippi.
She lived from 1909 until 2001, and thus was able to convey a good deal about the deep south in this period. Readers may grimace at her use of dated language to describe African American characters, but is must to enjoy and to learn from reading Eudora Welty.
With that caveat, I have enjoyed reading from this well-known and highly regarded author of southern fiction over the past two weeks. In certain instances, I read the stories out loud or listened to recordings, as a way to get inside the diction which reflects Welty's immersion in her native state of Mississippi.
She lived from 1909 until 2001, and thus was able to convey a good deal about the deep south in this period. Readers may grimace at her use of dated language to describe African American characters, but is must to enjoy and to learn from reading Eudora Welty.
September 12, 2021
I must confess: I only finished the first 180 pages, through the first of Welty's collections, A Curtain of Green. I am unable to read much Welty at a time; even when her characters are sympathetic, which is not often, their tales are almost always pathetic. Now, I have read Southern literature--I'm a big fan of Faulkner--but Welty's stories are just not meant to be read in big gulps. Though her writing is skillful, her stories cast a disconsolate pall over one's mind. If I do ever manage to read the rest of this collection of Welty's works, it will have to be over a number of months, maybe years.
June 8, 2024
Of this collection of Welty’s stories, essays, and memoirs I need add nothing to the comments of novelist and New Yorker editor William Maxwell: “That Eudora Welty’s work is beyond human power of praising, I don’t need to say. Everybody knows it.”
August 12, 2018
This author shows the fine art of writing short stories in a wonderful way. This is a great collection to grab and savor.
February 2, 2023
Well dang it I didn’t wanna like this book with the wonky name. But it got me. Life is precious, as hard as it is. Thanks Eudora.
November 13, 2023
Read 10 stories for old Lyme. Some were good and some were not to my liking.
September 1, 2025
This volume containing memoir, essays and many of Welty's stories gave me a good taste of her life and works. Ann Patchett recommended Welty's collected stories in the essay, "Eudora Welty, an Introduction," in Patchett's own wonderful book of essays, These Precious Days. Born in 1909 in Jackson, MS, Welty was a master story-teller of the South and won many awards, including the Pulitzer Price for Fiction for The Optimist's Daughter in 1972. I really enjoyed the memoir included in this volume, One Writer's Beginnings, because I could picture her childhood clearly and see similarities with my father's and in her love of reading, mine. I also enjoyed the essays. The characters in Welty's stories are layered and complex and the stories are not always straightforward. They run the gamut from humor to tragedy and often require some work and interpretation on the part of the reader. The stories also can be disturbing; they contain some opaque accounts of abuse and some racist language. I did some reading to help with the interpretation of several stories, including "Petrified Man," "Why I Live at the P.O.," "A Visit of Charity," Death of a Traveling Salesman," "A Worn Path," "The Burning," and "Where is the Voice Coming From?"
August 10, 2007
I have yet to read a book with such diversity of prose from a single author. Here are nearly a thousand pages of stories and essays with the incomparable Eudora Welty. Some are funny, some are introspective, some are sharp, some are hateful, some (well, most) are literary - and in so many voices that there is likely no living writer who could duplicate their number or quality, and certainly not both. How she was able to write so convincingly in so many different manners and styles I'll never understand, though nothing could help you understand so well as the essays on her own development that she penned, included towards the end of the book. Every aspiring writer should get this book and study it for its literary content and its storytelling might. Even casual readers should enjoy some of the stories, be it the likes of "Why I Live at the P.O.," detailing the humorous goings-on of a wealthy and ambivalent Southern household, or "Where Is That Voice Coming From?," the chilling first-person account of a racist murderer's work.
October 17, 2010
Her stories just amaze me, still so many years after they were first written. They paint such a vivid picture of place and time, and of a certain way of life. This is a keeper, to be read and re-read over and over again.
September 7, 2007
I used this book in a course and got a ton of use out of it.
March 13, 2014
An excellent selection of Eudora's short stories with a few novels thrown in.
February 23, 2015
Didn't finish, though at almost 900 pages I didn't care too much. Enjoy her short stories and may come back to this at a later date...
May 3, 2011
Not a fan of Miss Eudora, although I keep trying.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews